Galya Frank The Ethnographic Films of Barbara G. Myerhoff: Anthropology, Feminism, and the Politics of Jewish Identity, In Ruth Behar and Deborah A. Gordon, Women Writing Culture, University of California Press: Los Angeles, 1995, pp. 207-232, 1996,
"Every tradition has some gems, the fruits of thousands of years of practice. Now they have come down to us, and we cannot ignore or deny them. Even the food we eat has our ancestors and our cultural values in it. How can we say that we have nothing to do with our culture? We can find ways to honor our own traditions, and other traditions as well." Thich Nhat Than, Touching Peace, 1992
"Write for your dead. They are listening." Alice Walker
[p. 207] Anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff was a mentor to me. I considered her my friend, and I loved her. We met in 1979, the year after the publication of Number Our Days, Myerhoff's ethnography about aging among the very old Yiddish-speaking Jews who were members of the Israel Levin Senior Citizen Center in Venice, California. Based on fieldwork Meyerhoff began in 1972, Number Our Days was a gem of humanistic writing-social science for the masses, reportage filled with subtle emotional turns and rich intellectual play. Myerhoff's book was one of the first full-length ethnographies to integrate the reflexive, narrative, dialogic, processual, and interpretive approaches that have now moved to the center of anthropological discourse. It is [p. 208] ironic-and from a feminist standpoint disheartening-that no reference to Myerhoff appears in Writing Culture or in Anthropology as Cultural Critique, the works most often cited by anthropologists and other scholars when they discuss interpretive ethnography and experimental genres. Because of that omission, Myerhoff's work risks exclusion from the counter canon she helped invent.
In 1976 a film calledNumber Our Days was made about Myerhoff's fieldwork-in-progress for the KCET public television network. It won an Academy Award for the Best Short Subject Documentary in 1977 and brought Barbara Myerhoff's work further into the public eye with a story in People magazine. The book Number Our Days, published in 1978 was selected as one of the ten best social science books that year by the New York Times Book Review. Myerhoff' had already gained national attention in academic circles with her first book, Peyote Hunt: The Sacred Journey of the Huichol Indians, based on her doctoral fieldwork in Mexico, published in 1974 and nominated for a National Book Award in 1975. But the Academy Award for the film Number Our Days bumped Myerhoff into the category of being a celebrity and brought her a new measure of fame that she appeared to immensely enjoy.
The book Number Our Days was most likely the first full-length ethnographic study of a Jewish community in the United States. Certainly it was the best known and most accessible to a general audience. Myerhoff began to fill a particular niche in a growing movement among Jews in this country toward cultural and spiritual renewal. With support from her colleague, folklorist Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, an expert on Yiddish language and studies of cultural performance, Barbara Myerhoff became a sought-after spokesperson on Jewish topics to Jewish audiences. If you think about Margaret Mead who collaborated for seventeen years with Rhoda Metraux in writing a column on issues in American culture in the women's magazine Redbook, then perhaps Barbara Myerhoff was on her way to becoming something like the Jewish Margaret Mead.
The central theme of Myerhoff's professional and popular contribution was the importance of symbols, stories, and rituals in establishing and maintaining Jewish community-and, specifically for transforming disorder into coherence or meaning. Getting to know Barbara personally meant being affected by her quest for meaning, the gauge of which was her ability to make intellectually challenging, emotionally resonant, and usually long-enduring relationships with others. She was enormously charismatic. Anthropologist Paul Bohannan, who became dean of social sciences and communications at the University of Southern California (USC) during this period, remarked about his first meeting with Barbara Myerhoff that he was prepared for someone charming but unprepared for "how totally charming"she was.
Reading Number Our Days, I had felt Barbara's capacity for making connections powerfully because the people whose accents, whose faces, whose emotions, and whose history she portrayed were familiar. They were my people. And Barbara's work permitted me to perceive them in a new way, with less anguish about their self-sacrifice in the land of opportunity. These immigrants from Eastern Europe [p. 109] produced in one or two generations a professional American Jewish middle class which Myerhoff and I both represented.
[p. 109] Barbara perceived the lives of the Israel Levin Center members as dignified even in loneliness and poverty and as meaningful despite the many physical and social losses of old age. Her approach was a corrective to an anxious, self-critical mood in American Jewish intellectual life and popular culture. While writing this paper I showed Myerhoff's film in a graduate course on research methods in USC's Department of Occupational Therapy. One student wrote:
"Although most of the class seemed to agree that Myerhoff's similarity to her subjects was an asset, I found from my own personal reactions to the film that it could also be a liability. As a Jewish woman, I felt I was bringing a lot of "emotional baggage" into my viewing of the film which interfered with my ability to watch it with the mindset of a researcher. The fact that the subjects were so similar to my grandmother, who is currently dying, brought out feelings of guilt and depression that were often so distracting that I found it difficult to simply jot down notes. Furthermore the talk about how the religion is dying elicited all of my feelings of confusion and guilt over not having been a practicing Jew and started me thinking about what I will pass on to my children in terms of their religion and heritage. This also took me away from the purpose of watching the film."
This sort of response is not unusual for Jewish viewers. And Myerhoff would have considered such emotional and personal refections not extraneous to the purpose of her film but exactly on target. Myerhoff used to tell a story about having shown Number Our Days at a conference. When the lights came up after the film, the audience was in tears.
"This is obviously very moving," the moderator announced. "So let's break for ten minutes before the next panel."
Recounting that event, Barbara remarked forcefully, "I promised myself: The next time, I won't let them get away like that. I'll make them stay and talk about it."
Myerhoff's vision of the people at the Israel Levin Center was a form of redemption through historicization. She assumed the role of a granddaughter who took time from her busy and successful life to get her "grandparents," the recognition and respect they deserved. It was one part nachas fun kinder (joy from children)and the restdereheritz (respect). Embedded in this filial act was the irony that as a professional Myerhoff was not exactly sacrificing her time or herself. Living life as an anthropologist in the fullest sense was Myerhoff's fundamental project, which included continuing to construct herself as an encultured person. The old women at the Israel Levin Center understood this when they persistently inquired, "And who's with your children?"
Barbara discussed the afterlife of Number Our Days in two essays, Life Not Death in Venice: Its Second Life and Surviving Stories: Reflections on Number Our Days. A festival of Yiddish culture emphasizing the Israel Levin Center member's art work was presented at USC in 1980, and a theatrical adaptation of Num (p. 210) ber Our Days was developed and performed at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in 1981. From 1976 to 1980 Myerhoff was full professor and chairperson of the USC Department of Anthropology. With the intellectual sympathy and enthusiastic support of her colleagues, she established the emphasis in the department on visual anthropology. At first the Center for Visual Anthropology that she founded was simply a nominal unit within the department to which Number Our Days was credited. But Myerhoff's successes helped gain the support of the university to establish a Master's of Arts degree in Visual Anthropology (MAVA), which was also the departments's first graduate-level program. Courses in ethnology and anthropological theory were offered, along with ones in film production taught by faculty both in the department and in USC's large, well-equipped, and highly rated film school. MAVA has since become a leading program in visual anthropology. Its students' films have won numerous awards and prizes, including a student Academy Award nomination. The department now also offers a doctoral degree in social anthropology.
There is an old joke about the place of anthropology among the priorities of most universities. "Where is the anthropology department?" "Keep going till you find the oldest building on campus." In Barbara's day the Anthropology Department was housed on the first floor of Bruce Hall, a brick walk-up with a tiny elevator, an [p. 211] apartment house once on the outskirts of campus that had been engulfed by the university. When I visited the main office, a drably painted room which had been someone's front parlor, it was impossible not to be drawn into the aura and excitement of the Number Our Days phenomenon.. Open packing cases of Barbara's book were always kept near secretary Mae Horie's desk, ready to be shipped in response to the frequent phone requests for copies.
In Barbara's tiny office hung two primitive folk paintings by a members of the Israel Levin Center; one of a man in a tallis (prayer shawl) praying, the other of a woman blessing the Sabbath candles. (A Huischol yarn painting remained in the office but had been placed to one side.) On the lower shelf of her bookcase were several volumes of letters from people who had seen or read Number Our Days. The many piles of papers sometimes spilled over onto the folding director's chair covered in orange duck that sagged impossibly when, as a part-timer, I sat at Barbara's desk to type.
I had the feeling that Myerhoff could not let go of her enormously successful project, nor would it let go of her. A painful issue seemed to hover in the background: that of abandoning the center's elderly just as their children had. There was a period of transition before Barbara undertook her next major project, which would be her last. Initially attracted by the influx of recent Russian Jewish immigrants to Los Angeles, Barbara began in 1981 to study the Jewish community on and around Fairfax Avenue-a north-south street in the mid-Wilshire district synonymous with the name of Cantor's kosher-style delicatessen and bakery, a Los Angeles landmark, The Center for Visual Anthropology would produce a film based on the Fairfax study. Barbara initially invited Timothy Asch, the renowned ethnographic filmmaker whom she had recruited to teach at USC, to collaborate with her and Vikram Javanti on the project.
By this point in her career, Barbara had already been influenced by certain British social anthropologists and their emphasis on institutions and social processes. She was perhaps first exposed to this approach as a graduate student in anthropology at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) by her professor Hilda Kuper, who had been a student of Malinowski. Myerhoff and Kuper became warm friends. Later, when she herself was a professor at USC, Myerhoff collaborated with lawyer turned social anthropologist Sally Falk Moore, then on the faculty, who had taken Max Gluckman, head of the Manchester School, as her mentor. Eventually Barbara entered the exhilarating circle around Victor and Edith Turner of scholars interested in ritual and performance. (Victor Turner was the editor of the series in symbolic anthropology at Cornell University Press and published Myerhoff's Peyote Hunt and a volume she coedited with Moore.)
Thus, for Barbara, British social anthropological influences came not merely intellectually or professionally. They were part of a social world, a network of Africanists trained by Malinowski asnd his students, of whom some members like Myerhoff, were descendants of Jewish immigrants who had left Eastern Europe after the pogroms of 1881. Max Gluckman had been a friend of Hilda Kuper since they were [p. 212] both teenagers in southern Africa; the Kupers and the Moores were friends. Vic and Edie Turner were also old and dear friends of Hilda and Leo Kuper.
Number Our Days showed the humanistic and processual influence of Victor Turner. The film focussed primarily on the meanings of shared activities and rituals through time of the community that constituted the Israel Levin Senior Citizen Center, although Barbara also relied on life histories and expositions of cultural knowledge in her informants' heads-the latter focus more in the American anthropological tradition. In the Fairfax project, Barbara gravitated again to institutional and specifically religious life within the Jewish community and was fascinated by the startling array of diverse congregations located there. Finding herself at a great smorgasbord of Jewish life, Barbara intended to taste it all. But it was, at the same time that she began to feel tired and short of breath, and in June 1984 she learned she had lung cancer.
It was the summer of the Olympics in Los Angeles. I was visiting my friend anthropologist Rosamund Vanderburgh and her family in Owen Sound, Ontario. Hilda Kuper sent me a note written in her small, lively, and sometime indecipherable script. After commenting on the crowds due to the summer games and on family news, Hilda continued, in characteristic measured style:
"Yesterday Barbara Myerhoff came to see us-I begin with the good news. She drove herself and she looked as she had when I saw her two months ago. The doctors find she has lung cancer . . . Oh my dear Galya, it is very frightening and everyone is anguished. Yet she does not want pity; she needs support, recognition of the possibility of miracles. The film of Fairfax Jewry has been given a new focus; she is the centre, and the different groups ranging from Chassidic to Gay are in it providing their own healing powers. in addition to chemotherapy. Her friend Lyn[ne] who worked on Number Our Days, and who directed Testament, has taken on the directing of this project, which as received funding from Norman Lear; Barbara is excited by it, her spirit high. I'm sorry to have had to write and tell you of the illness, but know you will want to know and write."
As Hilda indicated, the filmic component of the Fairfax project was promptly and dramatically reorganized and focussed around Myerhoff herself as "the center." The result was a film entitled In Her Own Time, for which the last on-screen interviews with Myerhoff were completed only two weeks before her death on January 7, 1985. Barbara's initial impulse to document the diversity of Jewish life on Fairfax was checked by circumstances beyond her control. In Her Own Time became, among other things, a vehicle for Barbara's reflections on her illness experience while studying an ultra-Orthodox sect, the Lubavitcher Hasidim, and accepting traditional forms of healing that its leaders offered.
To many people, and I am one, Barbara Myerhoff's death was a stunning loss. Her personal example and her support profoundly shaped my thinking and practices as an anthropologist who is a woman and a Jew. The aspect of Barbara's work that has affected me the most is her proud assertion of an interpretative approach. [p. 23] Within this approach, I have been most impressed by her use of self for "reflexivity," her emphasis on story telling, her surprisingly fluent insights and emotional depth, and her wide-ranging appropriation of humanistic sources. Superb accounts of her intellectual and professional development and her place within wider scholarly currents have been prepared by a former student, anthropologist Riv-Ellen Prell, and by a colleague, Marc Kaminsky. I hope that Barbara herself would be pleased by my offering here, in which I try to show, focussing on her films, what her ethnographic example has made possible.
[p. 213] Reflexive Methodology in Film: Going Native without Leaving Home
"Of all the barometers capable of revealing to the historian the deeper movements of an economy, monetary phenomena are without doubt the most sensitive. But to look upon them, as a symptom only is to do them less than justice; they have been and they are, in their turn, effective causes. One might think of them as a seismograph that not only registers earth tremors, but sometime brings them about. This amounts to saying that when we really know the history of gold as a medium of exchange-during the Middle Ages, a flood of light will be shed upon many hidden trends and connections which at present elude our understanding." - -Marc Bloch The Problem with Gold in the Middle Ages, 1969
French medieval historian Marc Bloch's statement of method in an article written in 1933 suggests something of Myerhoff's approach fifty years later in In Her Own Time. As Bloch pointed out, certain phenomena not only register but affect change. Tracing monetary phenomena (gold coinage and circulation) from the late Roman Empire through the twelfth century, Bloch was able to portray and explain in relatively few pages the complex changing fortunes of diverse empires, nationalities, governments, religions and classes. Myerhoff's approach does something similar in a small-scale social context, but the phenomenon is a person, not a thing.
Anthropologists are often said to be the "instrument of research," like a seismograph that registers gross and subtle movement of a glass plate dipped in silver nitrate. that records the play of light. That was Myerhoff's view of her own methodological stance in In Her Own Time when she commented:
"I certainly didn't intend to make a film about the Orthodox per se. But they turned out to be somehow the most compelling and drew my life into theirs so deeply that they became the focus. And in a way that was kind of familiar and satisfying because that is really what anthropologists are taught to do. You study what is happening to others by understanding what is going on in yourself. And you yourself become the data gathering instrument. So that you come from a culture and step into a new one and how you respond to the new one tells you about them and about the one you came from."
[p. 114] This is the conventional professional view; its terminology the person as instrument." can be read in almost any book on ethnographic field methods. Myerhoff indeed used that approach on Number Our Days. The films shows her attending and documenting congregant meals at the Israel Levin Center, secular New Year's Eve dances. Friday-night Sabbath candle-lighting, and the ceremony of unveiling the monument at the grave of a member who had died the year before. She is shown interviewing the center's members along the ocean front, walking on the boardwalk with them, where they feed pigeons and stop to talk on benches. She interviews them in their homes.
But in the next film, In Her Own Time, Myerhoff's own life became a methodological tracer, an isotope that emitted particles of change into the environment and registered the reactions. This was a new and hastily invented method, but one that progressed to the next logical step given Myerhoff's prior work and was on the cutting edge of developments in ethnography elsewhere in the discipline. When diagnosed with cancer, Myerhoff was expected to have no more than six months to live. At this point she and Vikram Javanti met with Lynne Littman. Littman agreed to take over the direction of the film only if she could move Myerhoff to the center, with her illness as the trope for constructing a coherent piece. Her move to the center allowed Myerhoff to experience and record the Hasidic community more as an insider (albeit a novice or an initiate) than would have been possible otherwise. As in Bloch's essay, a phenomenon of choice afforded a path through a complex world of relations that would otherwise have been unintelligible. This is most evident in scenes throughout the film connected with the efforts of the Lubavitcher to help Barbara recover from lung cancer. Myerhoff's own life-and-death struggle made her like a "seismograph that not only registers earth tremors but sometimes brings them about."
The film opens with Barbara's visit to the office of a physician for a second opinion to diagnose the cancer in her lungs. The physician, who wears a yarmulke, the traditional daily head-covering of an Orthodox man, touches his hand to his lips and then touches the mezuzah on the doorpost before entering the the examining room. My first thought was the incongruity of his act-kissing his ungloved fingers-among the antiseptic protocols of medicine. He moved forward to take Myerhoff's medical history and gives her a physical examination. It is Myerhoff now who is being interviewed, her life history is being taken. She answers with a patient's requisite candor to the doctor's intimate inquiries. She had smoked, but only for a year, about a pack of cigarettes a week. she had had surgery, a hysterectomy, for a cervical carcinoma. Less anthropologist than anxious patient, Myerhoff questions the doctor in turn. The metaphor of a film within a film, and of going deeper into the self in the film than in the one before, is established with an X-ray image of Myerhoff's lungs while her physician's voice confirms the diagnosis and a klezmar-like horn begins softly to wail.
Although Barbara did receive chemotherapy to treat her lung cancer during the filming, In Her Own Time focuses on her willing and grateful acceptance of various [p. 215] magical Jewish interventions for her healing. In several scenes connected with healing, Barbara's own life events are the focus that generates her informants' speech and actions and on which she herself offers participant observations. These include Barbara's experience of immersion in a ritual bath (mikveh) for purification; her ritual change of name; her receiving an official Jewish writ of divorce (get) from a rabbinical court; and her phrasing a letter, with help from Reb Beryl Salzman and his wife, to request a miracle from the spiritual leader of the Lubavitcher Hasidim, Reb Menachem Mendel Schneerson.
[p. 215] Anthropology has always had heretics and apostates, people who were trained in the discipline and then went native. My teacher, L.L. Langness, relished retelling the legend of Frank Hamilton Cushing, who went to New Mexico to study Zuni Pueblo ceremonialism. Once initiated into secrets of the kiva, Cushing never came back. He did publish an impressive body of ethnographic material, but without divulging sacred facts. In a real sense, Barbara went native; but as Number Our Days showed, the easy dichotomy between native and nonnative in late modernity was already blurring. By the 1960s international markets and mass media had created what communications guru Marshall McLuhan had dubbed "the global village." Anthropologists were forced to notice that the distinction between native and nonnative were shifting in its utility as a heuristic and becoming more a didactic device. A landmark of this trend was the publication of a collection of essays edited by Messerschmidt on issues of doing anthropology at home and with one's own ethnic group. Despite being a Jew and having great charm, Barbara would probably not have been able to film a mikveh or a get in the insular world of the ultra-Orthodox had she herself not been a willing subject.
In neither of her films was Myerhoff completely native to the culture. In each there were distinct speech communities (Yiddish, classical Hebrew) to which Myerhoff did not belong. The people she studied were bilingual, or multilingual, but they spoke English to her. Yet Myerhoff did have bona fide credentials as a Jewish woman. She was a lady professor, yes, but with a nice Jewish punim (face), as she narrated in Number Our Days. Thus her subjects recognized themselves and their children in Barbara, just as she made efforts to see herself in them.
In Number Our Days, Barbara was able to join the community by creating a role for herself by following the example of social worker Morrie Rosen, the center's director. As described by Myerhoff in the film, Rosen was sometimes father, sometimes son, always advocate for the old people. But he was not one of them. Barbara did not learn Yiddish. And while it is arguable that to do so would have enriched her study greatly, Meyerhoff could never gain direct access to shtetl (village) life, the part of these old people's past that she emphasized as their core cultural reality. What Barbara could offer was herself as a surrogate to their assimilated families. It was impossible for her to gain entry as a participant observer into a world in which entire towns, villages, and their inhabitants in Europe had been effectively eradicated, decades after the immigration of Myerhoff's informants to America, by Hitler's genocide of the Jews. [p. 216]
[As I proof this copy, in 2011, I'm beginning to sense the smaller irony of the senior center lasting beyond the urban renewal project that destroyed their homes and community in Ocean Park and Venice; and Chabad is developing real estate at the corner of Rose and Lincoln Blvd., KR]
In making her next film, In Her Own Time, Barbara was an appropriate and eligible candidate for incorporation into an existing role in the community. People very much like her were becoming ba'alet teshuvah, secular Jews who "returned" to Orthodoxy. The Lubavitcher Hasidic movement known as Chabad, an outreach directed toward nonobservant Jews, was a major force in the ba'al teshuvah phenomenon. Thus Barbara's encounter in In Her Own Time with Sultana Shoshana, a secular Jew who led her family to adopt an ultra-Orthodox lifestyle, was particularly fascinating and challenging to her. Barbara reflected on this in an on-camera interview conducted by Lynne Littman: "To tell the truth, I can identify in that I can understand her. And probably more than anyone else I know, I feel envy because I feel that she stepped through that invisible barrier."
Barbara's Romance with Hasidism: A Guide for the Perplexed
"Learning that no longer starts from the Torah and leads into life, but the other way round: from life, from a world that . . . pretends to know nothing [of the Law], back to Torah . . . All of us to whom Judaism, to whom being a Jew, has again become the pivot of our lives . . . We all know that in being Jews we must not give up anything, not renounce anything, but lead everything back to Judaism. From the periphery back to the center; from the outside, in." -Frank Rosensweig, On Jewish Learning, 1971
Barbara Myerhoff's ignorance of the Hebrew prayers in In Her Own Time jumps out to me as an emblem of the religious disenfranchisement of certain Jewish women historically in Europe and the United States. Furthermore, it trouble me to see how Barbara, a feminist, places herself over and over again in the position of patient and supplicant, appealing and waiting for healing and redemption to come from above and beyond-from anywhere the learned men are. The scenes in which this temporal and spatial quality comes through are those concerning her own healing that come close to the end of the film and of Barbara's life.
In one scene Barbara receives a get, a Jewish ritual divorce. She had only recently been divorced from Lee Myerhoff, her husband of thirty years and the father of her two sons, Nick and Matt. Everyone who knew Barbara could sense that the divorce was devastating to her. Despite my own efforts to avoid thinking it, news of Barbara's divorce and the diagnosis of her cancer were linked in my mind.
Barbara's friends and associates knew that her parents had been divorced and that she had grown up without knowing her father. In an early article on reflexivity, Barbara described hers as an unhappy childhood in which books provided a "great consolation" and an "alternative world." She went on to memorialize her grandmother, Sophie Mann, who taught her to press a warm penny against a frosty window in winter to make a little frame through which life in the street outside became quite fascinating. Later, she dedicated Number Our Days to her gtrandmother. [p. 217]
In 1985, I attended a memorial gathering at Barbara's house organized by her close friend, writer Deena Metzger, who was appointed executor of Barbara's estate. The following day Barbara's belongings would be dismantled, In a corridor I saw a series of framed pencil sketches of figures of flappers wearing fashions of the 1920s. The drawings were signed by Barbara's mother, Florence. Barbara's friend and colleague Zandy Moore, then department chair, was standing beside me and explained that Barbara's mother had been a performer before Barbara was born.
"She was something of a flapper herself," Zandy commented. "Played the trombone in an all-girl band."
After Barbara's diagnosis of cancer, the Hasidic rabbis who had become her friends urged her to obtain a get, an official Jewish divorce. As Barbara narrated in the film, the purpose of the ritual was to get back her neshuma, her soul, from her husband. Getting back her soul was something she felt she had not yet done. Had I been asked, I would have advised Barbara by all means to go ahead with the ritual. But I felt uncomfortable with the actual event as documented in In Her Own Time.
As Barbara explicitly stated in her narration, "I put myself in their hands." [p. 218]
[p. 218] In the ritual the role of Barbara's husband was played by an old man, as improbable a "husband" for Barbara as anyone could be. Unlike Barbara, he needed no instructions, having played the surrogate role before. What struck me about Barbara's situation was her complete dependence on these functionaries to whom she had been escorted by her friends, the two Lubavitcher rabbis. She repeated what she was told to say during the divorce proceeding, certainly one of the most archaic enactments of patriarchal authority extant in Jewish practice. After all, it is the husband who must agree to grant a get to release his wife; and he may refuse to do so. The stand-in for Barbara's husband delivered the writ from on high to her waiting hands. Exaggerated care was taken so that Barbara and her "husband" did not touch. Barbara obediently followed the directions to catch the folded documents, place it under her arm, and walk several paces away and back. The functionary took the document and cut throughout the corners.
With this act of severing, Barbara was informed that her divorce was accomplished, It was exactly the kind of symbolic enactment noted by van Gennep in his classic book on the rites of passage-the work that so emphatically influenced Victor Turner, Barbara Myerhoff, and many other students of ritual life. The functionary pronounced the formula that made Barbara, a dying woman, after a brief interim "permissible to anyone." Why did Barbara turn to these bureaucratic male guardians of Orthodoxy, who could perhaps only dimly perceive the richly developed person Barbara was, for the authority to regain her soul?
Another scene documented Barbara sitting on one side of a mechitza, the partition, that separates women from men in an Orthodox synagogue. She could only sit and peer around the mechitza while her friend and informant, Reb Naftali Estulin, performed a ritual to change her name and thus confuse the Angel of Death. Barbara did not understand Hebrew and so asked one of the male congregants to let her know when the rabbi reached the portion of the service in which he could pronounce her new name "Chana Basha bas Feigi."
Barbara explained to the camera that her new name meant "all good things" as she waited for the rabbi to bestow her life-preserving name in a service from which she was physically separated and linguistically excluded. When the ceremony was completed, Barbara smiled with the dizzy happiness of a child who receives a sweet-or perhaps it was the smile of an outpatient giddy on pain-killing medication.
"I expect to feel better this afternoon," Barbara concluded.
It is not difficult to see Barbara's romance with the Hasidim partly in psychoanalytic terms. Her vulnerability to a fatal disease came soon after she was divorced from her husband of thirty years and only a year after her mentor, Victor Turner had died. Her desire for contact with her father had been thwarted by her mother who, to protect the child, withheld from her letters that he sent. Barbara did not meet her father until quite late in her life , and found him an ordinary man. Prell writes about Barbara's tendency to value the cultural knowledge invested in women less than that invested in men-in the Huichol shaman, Ramon Silva; in the iconoclast Shmuel [p. 119] Goldman in Number Our Days and in Victor Turner, a most creative anthropologist, gifted with a large and inclusive spirit, but Barbara chose mentors, including Hilda Kuper, who were strongly involved in their marriages. With the wives of her male mentors, (Lupe Silva, Rebekkah Goldman, and Edie Turner) Barbara had important , sometimes conflictual, sometimes rewarding relations, if in the shadow of the more important "father." Thus Barbara was involved always in remaking her family, bringing in the missing father and dealing with the ambivalent mother.
The central theme of Number Our Days was death, which Myerhoff called in her narration, "the invisible protagonist in every little scene." Paradoxically, a central preoccupation of In Her Own Time is marriage. Barbara's interview with Nesha, an ultra-Orthodox woman who fits women for wigs, focuses on purity and impurity-and fidelity and infidelity-on marital relations. Reb Beryl Salzman delivers a lecture on the benefits of the family purity laws prohibiting contact between husbands and wives. He validates what Nesha has already confirmed-that sexual prohibitions lasting two weeks out of every month are a way of keeping physical love alive in his marriage. Shoshana/Sultana and her husband, though shown sparring over their account of early struggles about sleeping in separate beds, nevertheless remain bound together. The story of a young Russian couple, former refusniks, is woven through the film, and their Hasidic wedding ceremony is documented.
By the time Barbara is shown having her first mikvah (ritual bath) to purify herself for the ceremony to change her name, it has been well established that mikveh is taken by women to mark the end of a menstrual period. In a voice overlay, Barbara remarks that it must be "very arousing" to go to the mikveh before making love with one's husband after a two-week separation. Reflections about her impending death (the ostensible theme of In Her Own Time) are displaced by an emphasis on love, marriage, family, and the cultural and reproductive survival they imply.
It could be said that Barbara's second film exoticized (and eroticized) the Hasidim. But concerns with survival may help explain the scene of men in shirt-sleeves with beards and payes (sidelocks) shoveling ritually prepared Passover matzos (unleavened bread) like pizzas in and out of the ovens. The scene evokes laughter, partly because of the incongruity of these scholarly types in the kitchen and partly because of the background music, a klezmer band playing freilich (happy) music at a frantic pace.
In a voice overlay Barbara is heard to comment unselfconsciously, "It was as if I walked into a New Guinean village in my own backyard."
What purpose does this exoticization of the Lubavitcher serve? Jews and ovens make a potent conjunction of images from the standpoint of the Holocaust, a collective memory never far from the surface in American Jews of Ashkenazic origin. There is subconscious shock value to seeing people, in a film about Jews, shoveling things into open ovens. The comical music cues instant relief: harmless-looking Jews are in command and innocent matzos (Nazis) are the only things going in and out of the ovens. Barbara's reference to far-off New Guinea may underscore the psychological distancing required to deal with the Holocaust in the film. Closer to death [p. 220] herself in Number Our Days, Myerhoff appears to have focused this time not on the Holocaust, which indeed brought about the demise of Hasidism in Europe, but on political and religious suppression of Jews in the then Soviet Union.
[p. 220] Had Barbara lived, she-like any informant-might have confirmed or disconfirmed my symbolic analysis of scenes in her films. But she died two weeks after the last interview was recorded for the film. The selection and editing of scenes, music, and voice overlays were the work of director Lynne Littman and coproducer Vikram Jayann. Thus many difficult issues concerning interpretation of the film remain.
The matzo-baking scene may represent an emphatic choice made by Myerhoff's surviving colleagues. But it is also filler material salvaged from the period prior to Myerhoff's diagnosis, when a less focused film crew cruised not only the Lubavitcher Hasidim but also the Satmat Hasidim, gays, and anonymous men and women on the street in search of colorful footage."
The preoccupation with marriage in the film could have been as much director Lynne Littman's, then experiencing a divorce, as Myerhoff's. We cannot assume Myerhoff to have been merely introspecting on her experiences or simply providing narration; she was engaged in an intense life-and-death drama with Littman and Javanti through the filmic veil. Thus Myerhoff cannot be viewed unproblematically as a naive informant on her forays into the world of the ultra-Orthodox. She must be seen also as a visual anthropologist in a trance of deep play, reenacting one last time the role of anthropologist taking part in exotic rituals, as award-winning Ariadne adding precious weeks to her life by spinning one last tale.
Hilda Kuper had it right: Myerhoff had intended to cast the Hasidim and gays in the same film. But that is where the story begins, not ends. The Lubavitcher refused to appear in the film with gays. Just when Myerhoff was considering going head to head over the issue, most of the film shot at Beth Chayim Chadashim, the gay and lesbian synagogue of the Fairfax district, was spoiled in the lab. Was it romance, after all, or beshert (fate) that moved the Hasidim along with Barbara to center stage?
Before, Through, and Beyond Her Own Time: Anthropologia Pro Vita Sua
[p.. 220] "Judaism is a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time . . . The Sabbaths are our great cathedrals; and our Holy of Holies is a shrine that neither the Romans nor the Germans were able to burn; a shrine that even apostasy cannot easily obliterate; the Day of Atonement . . . Jewish ritual may be characterized as the art of significant forms in time, as architecture of time. Most of its observances-the Sabbath, the New Moon, the festivals, the Sabbatical and the Jubilee year-depend on a certain hour of the day or season of the year." Abraham Herschel, The Sabbath, 1951
In his critique of Barbara Myerhoff's approach to narrative, Marc Kaminsky takes a postmodernist position: Myerhoff's work was limited by her commitment to [p. 221] meaning as "coherence" and her preference for narrative closure." Kaminsky questions whether coherence and closure are possible, or even desirable , when presenting the experiences of individuals and groups. Riv-Ellen Prell suggests that Myerhoff's view of narrative was based on Redfield's dualistic model of the "Great Tradition" (written by priests, scholars, and their elite patrons) and the "Little Tradition" (narrated by the folk)." Most anthropologists today view Redfield's approach as glossing too heavily over the polyphony of voices. Kaminsky uses his own life history to point out contrasts of social class, politics, language, and ethnic milieu that would make his account of American Jewish culture different from that which Myerhoff created in Number Our Days.
Myerhoff was aware that there is a political dimension in narrative. She taught that "Little Traditions," because they are marginal, are often subversive. Her article with Deena Metzger on women's journals reflects an awareness of the historical marginalization of European women's voices because of restricted literacy and confinements to devalued genres. That there can be no story of the Jewish people, only stories, is a position I associate with Barbara's thought. In a talk on ritual at a conference on "Illuminating the Unwritten Scroll: Women's Spirituality and Jewish Traditions," Myerhoff drew on the example of the Passover seder to emphasize variation and improvisation, the reframing and even the disputes that arise while performing the ritual acts (and retelling "the" story.) In In Her Own Time, one has only to notice the knowing look of amusement Barbara shares with the camera as Shoshana/Sultana and her husband assert discrepant versions of their family's turn to Orthodoxy and then struggle to smooth them into a coherent account.
Barbara did not pursue the more dialectical theories implied by her interests yet not encompassed by Redfield's "Great Tradition/Little Tradition" approach. We do not find in Myerhoff the ideas and language of Marxism and critical theory: She did not cite Gramsci on hegemonic discourse; Adorno and Benjamin were not invoked to critique the forms and functions of popular media. There was no reference to Raymond Williams or the newer, interdisciplinary iconoclasts of the cultural studies movement dealing with the implications of multiple and diverse cultural identities. She did not apply Bakhtin's concept of "heterogolossia." Number Our Days came during the Geertz craze, before the new anthropological fashions were out. Yet Barbara did in her ethnographies many of the things those writers only theorized about.
I find Barbara Myerhoff's work useful and relevant to postmodern discourse on gender and ethnicity. Number Our Days deals with the construction and deconstruction of traditional identities. In Her Own Time takes the next step of showing Myerhoff's distress at her own limitations in achieving a coherent Jewish identity. She was tantalized by what appeared to her a rather strict dichotomy between secular rationalism and spiritual belief. In the film, Myerhoff states clearly the conflict between her desire for order, meaning, and coherence (that she perceived in the lifestyles of the Hasidim) and her intolerance of imposed restrictions. She also displays her desire to enjoy valued prerogatives of the Orthodox Jewish male while [p. 222}
[missing page 222]
[p. 223] retaining her identity as a modern woman. And the film reveals Myerhoff's near failure to meet the daunting challenge set by her earlier work on aging-that of making a coherent story about herself to meet impending death.
[p. 223] Myerhoff's approach to these dilemmas was encapsulated in a scene at the home of Shoshana'a/Sutana which, incidentally shows off her skill as a field interviewer.
Indicating a bookcase on her left, Barbara remarked, "This is the library of a profoundly questioning mind: Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Cervantes.
"And this" she continued, pointing, to the bookcase on her right, "is the library of a profoundly believing mind. How do you reconcile them?
Shoshana said there was no contradictions for her between the two kinds of knowledge.
Barbara shook her head and responded gracefully with a quote from somewhere: "When the heart is truly open there is room for No and Yes."
If Jews had saints (and some Jewish traditions have them), Barbara Myerhoff was not one. She seemed less concerned with the political implications of her work than I would have liked. I don't know that Myerhoff ever questioned the limited view of the Lubavitcher Hasidim that her film presented. It may not have concerned her that her film was great publicity for Chabad. With nearly two hundred thousand followers, Chabad, alone among the Orthodox, has launched an audacious Jewish proselytizing movement with "mitzvah (good deed) tanks" patrolling the Lower East Side and the Golan Heights. Some Lubavitcher regarded their leader, Reb Menachem Mendel Schneerson, as the Messiah. It is reported that nearly every word of the sect's leader was taped and broadcast world wide on the Lubavitcher satellite television network. His talks on the Sabbath (when recording is forbidden) were reconstructed by scribes and faxed to disciples at the outposts of empire the minute the sun sets. This is the man to whom Barbara was filmed writing a letter to request a personal miracle.
Respectable critics of the late Rebbe called his authoritarianism, cult like, a dangerous quality in the world of Middle Eastern politics in which he more than dabbled . Although he never visited Israel, many of his followers live there even setting up in Kfar Habad a replica of his three-story brick home in Brooklyn at 770 Eastern Parkway. More than once the Rebbe intervened and disrupted the fragile Middle East peace process. In 1992 his comment to a visiting Israeli cabinet minister on trading land for peace ("It is an abomination even to think about discussing autonomy for the Palestinians") was widely reported by the Israeli press and had its intended cooling-off effect on Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. With friends like these, do we need enemies?
I recall a story told by Deena Metzger at the gathering of friends in 1985. The mythologist Joseph Campbell was reported to have made some anti-Semitic remarks. Barbara was said to have dismissed them. More important to her was Campbell's scholarship, which she had found inspiring not only in her youth, but throughout her career. In her last, posthumously published piece, Myerhoff used Campbell's analy - p. 224}sis of the hero's journey as the backbone of her account of her participant observer of a pilgrimage to Meron.
[p. 225] Barbara also believed that brilliant people could be excused for arrogance. To her it was a character blemish rather than a deadly sin.
Was Barbara arrogant? I don't think so. Probably her worst sin was chutzpah (nerve). Witness the scene in In Her Own Time in which she interviews Nesha the hairdresser. She plays Nesha like a fiddle-skillfully, daringly- without Neyshe knowing.
As a mentor, Barbara was generous and caring. She did what mentors do: she listened to me and made me feel that my ideas were important. she invited me to prepare papers at conferences, introduced me to friends and colleagues, mentioned my work, wrote letters of recommendation, advised me in job interviews, and proposed my name instead of hers when she declined professional invitations. When I was disappointed not to receive a full-time position in the Department of Anthropology at USC in 1980, she took me aside to read from a confidential letter. She bolstered my self-confidence by informing me, whether it was the case or not, that people don't usually say the kinds of things my referee wrote. That talk meant a great deal to me. When subsequently I applied for an advertised position for an anthropologist in the Department of Occupational Therapy at USC Barbara prepped me for the interview and encouraged me to mention my strong relationship with the Anthropology Department, which would offer a joint appointment, and the expectation of future collaboration.
"And don't forget to smile," Barbara prompted. "You have a beautiful smile."
No matter how fragmented and incoherent the "self" is alleged to have become in late modernity, I hope we will never outgrow our need for heroes (plural) and with a small "h"), inspiring teachers, and role models. Myerhoff was one of these, not just to me but to many others. "She helped open a door in contemporary anthropology for things to come that we cannot yet assess. As a middle-class professional living out the liberal feminism of her time, Myerhoff positioned herself and her ideas revealingly and allowed us the privilege of accessing them. One thing is certain: the reflexive methods Myerhoff espoused and pioneered finally extended to Jewish ethnicity in the United States the same seriousness and regard that Boasian anthropology has so assiduously accorded the "Other."
According to the Bible, every fiftieth year is to be proclaimed as a Jubilee. All the laws governing the sabbatical year apply to the Jubilee. but with additional provisions. According to Leviticus (25:9-10), the fiftieth year or the Jubilee meant "liberty proclaimed throughout the land unto all its inhabitants." All slaves were released and all land acquired by means other than inheritance was restored to the original owner. The custom was designed to prevent the accumulation of vast wealth in the hands of the few and the pauperization of the many. Barbara Myerhoff died in the seventh monthly after her illness was diagnosed, in her forty-ninth year. Numerologically I take her death to mark, for anthropology and the politics of Jewish identity in America, a completion and renewal.
[p. 224 Bill Aaron photo of Barbara Myerhoff]
[p. 225] Notes: Acknowledgements:
. . .
1, Barbara Myerhoff, Number Our Days, (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1978). Myerhoff's fieldwork was funded by the National Science Foundation as part of a multiethnic study of aging, with sponsorship of the Andrus Gerontology Center at the University of Southern California (USC). The author, Gelya Frank, met Barbara Myerhoff in June 1979 . . .
. . .
3. Lynne Littman, producer and director, Number Our Days, 16mm color-sound film, 30 minutes, produced for the Public Broadcasting Corporation, 1976; Direct Cinema, Santa Monica, California (distributor). In addition to the Academy Award, the film also won the Special Jury Award for Outstanding Achievement, 20th International San Francisco Film Festival, 1976; and the Public Broadcasting Corporation Special Award, 1976.
[p. 226] . . .
8. American Jews constitute 3 percent of the U.S. population. Forty percent of American Jews belong to the working class.
9. Barbara Myerhoff, "Life Not Death in Venice,"in The Anthropology of Experience, ed. Victor Turner and Edward W. Bruner (Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1986, pp. 261-287. [There are other publications related to the stories of people in Number Our Days]
. . .
[p. 227] . . .
13. Myerhoff received a BA in sociology at UCLA in 1958 and an MA in human development from the University of Chicago, in 1963, with a thesis on "Father-Daughter Incest Among Delinquent Girls." Her Ph.D. in Anthropology at UCLA was awarded in 1968, with distinction. . . .
. . .
17. Lyne Littman, director, Vikram Jayant and Lynne Littman, producers, In Her Own Time, 16 mm, color-sound film, 60 minutes, Direct Cinema, Santa Monica, Calif. (distributor).
[p. 228] . . .
. . .
21. As much as a decade earlier, David MacDougal (Beyond Observational Cinema, in Principles of Visual Anthropology, ed. Paul Hockings the Hague: Mouton, 1965, pp 109-14, called for visual anthropologists to augment viewers' understanding of filmed realities by making visible otherwise hidden aspects of the filmic situation; He did not, however, discuss the possibility of the visual anthropologist's becoming the subject, as happened in Myerhoff's film. In written ethnographies, especially in life histories, the role of the anthropologist as autobiographer was coming into
[p.
. . .
28. Hasidism is . . . Menachem Mendel Schneerson, a Sorbonne-educated engineer born in 1902, who inherited his position of leadership in 1950 and died in 1994.
29. Lynne Littman's general criticism of my essay [Galya Frank, The Ethnographic Films of Barbara Myerhoff, see above] was its literalism, its confusion of film and reality . . . Littman said, "There is no sense here of making a movie . . . which misses a level of Barbara's incredible professionalism. Barbara, when working on a movie, was an actress. She was not entering into Hassidic life . . . She was an uncanny performer and had an awareness of how quickly to make a point . . . She was a scientist. . . . She wanted a miracle . . ."
Deena Metzger similarly portrayed Barbara as a completely secular Jew, yet heard Barbara's comments . . . as "wishing that she could step through to faith."
. . .
31. Deena Metzger, thinking back to Barbara's role in the women's community that centered around The Women's Building in Los Angeles in the 1970s, commented: "Most women at that time, even her friends, would not have called her a "feminist". Lynne Littman commented: "The feminist question is not the right grid. Barbara tried to be a feminist. She was too busy. she missed the women's movement. She was producing. She was out working. She was out doing." {p. 230]
. . .
[p. 231] . . .
. . .
41. The two-day conference, held at USC on November 4 and 5, 1984, was organized by Rabbi Laura Geller and Rabbi Patricia Karlin-Newman and was sponsored mainly by grants from the Max and Anna Levinson Foundation and the Jewish Community Foundation of the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles. Myerhoff shared the podium with E.M. Broner in a session on transforming Jewish ritual in which each delivered a keynote address. Broner has since published an account of female retellings of the Passover story over sixteen years of seders conducted by "the Seder Sisters," a group including a number of high-profile feminists (Phyllis Cheslerr, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, Grace Paley and numerous others.) See E.M. Broner, The Telling, Harper: San Francisco, 1993.
. . .
E.M. Broner, The Telling, Harper: San Francisco, 1993.
James Clifford and George E. Marcus (eds.), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography U. California Press: Berkeley, 1986.
Langness, L.L. and Frank, Gelya Lives: An Anthropological Approach to Biography, Chandler and Sharp: Novato, Calif., 1981.
George E. Marcus and Michael M.J. Fischer Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences, University of Chicago Press; Chicago, 1986
Barbara Myerhoff, "Life Not Death in Venice,"in The Anthropology of Experience, ed. Victor Turner and Edward W. Bruner (Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1986, pp. 261-287
Barbara Myerhoff, Number Our Days, E.P. Dutton: New York, 1978.
Victor Turner and Edward W. Bruner (eds.) Anthropology of Experience, University of Illinois Press: Urbana and Chicago, 1986, pp. 261-287.